Quote:
All,
It is not that awareness altering drugs can never produce valuable insights, they can, but rather that such drugs are much more likely to become a part of the problem than a part of the solution as you work toward your goal of evolving the quality of your consciousness. Their upside is infinitesimal in comparison to their downside. What constitutes an upside often appears, because of its suddenness, more valuable than it really is.
Drugs do not constitute a shortcut. Drugs do constitute a trap by encouraging you to believe in a phantom upside that does not exist while reducing your ability to precisely control the focus of your awareness. Your consciousness is like a precisely and subtly tuned tool – a delicate instrument – drugs interact with that instrument like a sledgehammer – detuning and increasing entropy in exchange for a random big bang.
The probability that you will derive some lasting benefit from a psychotropic drug is inversely proportional to the number of times you use such drugs. There is no free lunch – you only get to keep what you earn. If you have done 95% of the work, the drug may bump you over that last 5% and offer you an “ahh-haaa!” moment. But if you have done only 60 % of the work the drug will only make it harder and take longer for you to accomplish the last 40%.
Expecting drugs to deliver or aid in consciousness evolution is a fool’s dream. Primitive societies, who know how to use psychotropic drugs to that end, are trapped at a low level of understanding, functionality, and awareness. You might think that would be better than no understanding, no functionality, and no awareness, but that constitutes a false choice. The price of “easy” is very high. Such people have no idea what they have given up for what they get. Like forgoing a high school, college, and graduate school education so one can spend all of one’s time playing on a brightly painted jungle gym in a big sandbox. That will always appear to a 5 year old to be a cool choice. Because indulging in psychotropic drugs over time eliminates other options, it becomes more and more difficult to escape that particular sandbox. In terms of consciousness evolution, a 50 year old stuck in a kindergarten sandbox may be completely normal for our drug saturated culture (both legal and illegal, common and uncommon), but it is sad just the same.
Tom